A Half-Assed Statistical Analysis Of The Half-Assed Home Run Derby's Half-Assed Announcing
Chris Berman said the word "BACK" 78 times last night, 66 of which were in reference to home runs. That's about .62 "BACK"s per homer, a figure we assume is much lower than in previous years. Here's a breakdown of each player's traditional and Berman statistics (distance data from MLB.com):
Player | Total HR | Total BACK | BACKs Per HR | Avg Dist | Longest | Total Dist |
Cano | 32 | 29 | 0.91 | 433 | 472 | 13856 |
Gonzalez | 31 | 12 | 0.39 | 420 | 452 | 13020 |
Ortiz | 13 | 2 | 0.15 | 426 | 459 | 5538 |
Fielder | 14 | 12 | 0.86 | 432 | 474 | 6048 |
Holliday | 7 | 1 | 0.14 | 420 | 443 | 2940 |
Bautista | 4 | 3 | 0.75 | 401 | 412 | 1604 |
Weeks | 3 | 4 | 1.33 | 420 | 427 | 1260 |
Kemp | 2 | 3 | 1.50 | 425 | 427 | 850 |
Matt Kemp and Rickie Weeks were the only players whose "BACK" total exceeded their home run total — chalk that up to sympathy. If you just can't get enough Home Run Derby meta-analysis, here are the correlation coefficients between each statistic in the above table.
HR |
BACK |
BACKs/HR |
Avg Dist |
Longest | ||
Total "BACK" |
0.8218 | |||||
BACKs per HR |
-0.3245 |
0.1194 | ||||
Average Dist |
0.4384 |
0.5313 |
0.10 | |||
Longest |
0.7099 |
0.6495 |
-0.33 |
0.8298 | ||
Total Dist |
0.9997 |
0.8323 |
-0.32 |
0.4522 |
0.7193 |


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